* Hot on the trail of the recent Minor Rockstar Update and the "Max Payne 3 is getting close?" posts, Rockstar has just announced that Max Payne 3 is getting closer to completion and that we're going to be getting a lot of news within the next few months.

* Also, hot on the trail of that Diablo Clone post (in which Diablo was once compared to a clone of Gauntlet, but now users just call new games clones of old Blizzard games), just 2 weeks later a wonderfully confirming forum post was made by an average MMO-Champion user.

I'm not shocked in the least that many gamers believe that Gauntlet was just a clone of Blizzard's "much older" Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 games. Everyone on Blizzard's PR department deserves a raise. :)

* Activision Blizzards Analyst Day is coming up this Thursday, so expect some new announcements this week. During past Analyst Days, there have been new game announcements (COD6) or confirmations as well as zany Activision quotes about the current state of console, gaming, and their vision of their future.

* You've probably already heard about the massive Copyright theft by "Chad Love", if that's his real name, of ART4LOVE.COM. When I first heard about it over a week back, I immediately thought about that "Everyone Is A Pirate" post. There were potentially thousands of people who purchased pirated art from this very professional looking website, and they were even provided a Certificate of Authenticity with the art. This is just one small operation out of thousands of other fraudulent (but professional looking) websites out there selling pirated goods to unsuspecting consumers.

* I have a bad feeling about the game length of Diablo 3. It looks like leveling in the game is too quick (e.g. Lvl 30 by Act 2), and each of the Acts will be much shorter than Diablo 2. It's almost as if the difficulty levels were created to extend the length of the game rather than for re playability purposes like in D2. I really hope we won't be seeing too many "this game is too short" reviews. I may have to look into this a bit more to see if Blizzard has made any recent comments about the game length.

* Did some researching and found out that each Act is about 2 hours long. So, that's 8 hours for a full playthrough of the game and then you can go back and do it again and again on different difficulty levels. According to Blizzard, you will be able to complete the difficulty levels faster as you progress too, so Nightmare and Hell will take less than 8 hours. That sounds rather disappointing and I hope it's not accurate. Each play through should be at least 25-30 hours in length (not 8), and then shorter periods for each followup difficulty excluding Inferno. It really worries me that the game is going to be too short now and will rely on Auction House metagames and simply replaying the exact same game again but with NPC palette swaps..

On a related note, the reason why they only need players to test such a small section of Diablo 3 in the beta is because D3 is much easier to manage, test, and QA than WOW. D3 has a very small fraction of thousands of WOW quests and gameplay mechanics. A small QA team can easily spellcheck and test everything in the game over a short period of time. The only testing that's really needed from us is for load, server, and technical reasons.

Following the path left behind by some of Daeity's old drafts, I did a little investigation and came across some interesting information. You can't really call these leaks as it's just information I spotted on a publicly accessible website. The term "leaks" tends to get overused a lot.. it should only be reserved for actual leaks of insider information from real employees. If you stumble upon information on a blog, for example, it's not considered "a leak".

This is definitely new information though, I didn't find any references anywhere else to this.

So.. Cameron here was on the Titan team for 2 years as their World Designer, and then transitioned to Writing and Development for other Blizzard (trans)media in August 2010.

Here's what he had to say about their Next-Gen MMO:

Imagining, creating, and writing the universe for Blizzard's new MMO (working title: Titan) from the ground up -- the history, philosophy, heroes, and villains. In addition to the core construction of the game's story, I wrote flavor pieces for the main characters and important events to lend depth and immersion for our team. Much of my time involved meeting with the art and animation team to ensure their work wove into the narrative.

So, apparently it will be storyline driven, have main characters, histories, and heroes/villains. It won't be completely like a Second Life type game, but probably a combination of sorts with a real world, actors, story, and history.

Cameron also has a twitter account here. He makes references to the Titan project a few times, like when it's existence was first discovered. [Links: 1 2 3]

On June 10, 2010, he tweeted: 'I just got to tell the one of our artists "Yes, Stan Sakai is definitely on board."'

This was while Cameron was working on Titan and "Much of (his) time involved meeting with the art and animation team to ensure work woke into the narrative." Also, Stan Sakai at the time was already working for Blizzard on the separate World of Warcraft magazine. He had a recurring comic strip called "Goblin vs. Gnome."

This would imply that the legendary artist Stan Sakai was brought on board into the Titan MMO as a writer. :)

Cameron's first tweet (while working on Titan), was that he's "shifting tectonic plates, raising Atlantis, and reviving Teotihuacan. Damn I love my job." This might just be a figure of speech, and have nothing to do with Titan, but I figured I would make note of it.

The other discoveries, however, are certainly interesting and confirm some of Daeity's old blogposts about multiple environments (or universes) and societies intended to attract a wider audience of players. Blizzard has also been snagging up employees who previously worked on RAGE (Post-Apocalyptic), the Halo MMO, and a "next gen NCSOFT game". Also, audio engineers who developed the CryTek engine.

Here are some of the assumptions I'm adding to "the list":

* Titan is possibly taking a "The Secret World" type approach. Wide variety of environments or "universes" and many different types of gameplay.
* One of these worlds may have a Stan Sakai influence, but there will be elements of fantasy and scifi from the other writers.
* Possible change in gameplay depending on the "world" you're in.
* Designed with real world payment systems from the ground up with heavy social integration. Not an Auction House, but rather a way to buy, sell, rent, or trade virtual constructions or items.
* Game will have multiple expansion packs.
* Not a casual game, but will have casual elements in the gameplay. Blizzard looking to compete with Zynga and snag their customers.

I'll continue hunting around to see if there's anything else out there. This only took me about 30 minutes to find, and I'm surprised that this information hasn't been published anywhere else on the web.

There are websites out there completely dedicated to collecting Titan information, and they didn't even know this. Most of them just have outdated information, and short employee lists of people suspected to be working on Titan. It's kind of sad.

The RockstarToronto.com and RockstarVancouver webpages are no more, they've taken them down and are now being re directed to the main Rockstargames.com website. Those are the only two sites I had followed, but if there were any other independent Rockstar websites, they would all have been changed as well.

The new Rockstar Toronto website has also been updated with the following statement: "Presently, Rockstar Toronto is working away on multiple titles, including the forthcoming Max Payne 3."

They been hiring many new employees over the past few months, for both console and PC positions. Once Max Payne 3 is finally completed, we'll have a much better idea of the other titles they're working on. Hopefully RDR PC.

The Rockstar Vancouver page mentions that they're only working on Max Payne 3 right now. Rockstar has been very quiet about the MP3 development progress and there hasn't been a release date although it's suspected to be late 2012. It's been delayed multiple times so far.

Rockstar Vancouver has been hiring for Audio/Gameplay Programmer and Level Scripter/QA positions over the past several months. I can't tell if they are hiring for the same position over and over though. All of the other Rockstar divisions are currently hiring, but Vancouver has nothing on their job board as of today. Rockstar Toronto, though, has been on hiring blitzes all year for several different jobs and they're still hiring.

That raises an eyebrow. Everyone is hiring except for Rockstar Vancouver, they're only working on Max Payne 3, possibly hiring for a couple replacement jobs only, it's been delayed multiple times, and Rockstar doesn't like talking about it.

Rockstar just announced (a day before the webpage changes) that they'll be presenting at the upcoming 8th Annual Equity Growth Conference. It will be taking place on September 13, 2011. I'm not expecting any big announcements from this conference.. the only thing that came out of last years talk was that "Kids Are Embarrassed To Play Wii According To Take-Two". However, a few weeks later there were huge shake ups within Take Two, and Ben Feder (the guy who gave the talk at G7 Equity Growth) stepped down as CEO of Take Two.

I wonder if there will be any other shake ups (e.g. firings or layoffs) this coming October or sooner. September might be a good time to sell stock and then purchase back in November at a lower value. :)